New records announced from Normil Hawaiians & Trash Kit, upcoming London shows for Hygiene, Ana da Silva / Phew and Chris Cohen!

Hello again! Thank you heavily for coming out to see Priests, Hen Ogledd and The Essex Green this last week! Quite the whirlwind of sound! Below you’ll find us outline three more upcoming shows for May, from next Friday’s album launch at The Stag’s Head for Hygiene, via Monday 27 May’s visit to St Pancras Old Church with the truly dynamic duo of Ana Da Silva & Phew, through to Wednesday 29 May’s Chris Cohen concert at Moth Club. So yes, plenty to keep us busy as we edge towards June, and that’s before we mention Bilge Pump and Witching Waves too!   This last week has been another stacked one for Upset The Rhythm as a record label too, as we announced two huge July releases from Trash Kit and Normil Hawaiians.

Trash Kit return with a long-anticipated third album on July 5th! Let me tell you, it’s nothing short of astonishing, totally alive and epic in sound and sensibility. Trash Kit are Rachel Aggs, Rachel Horwood and Gill Partington. Three deeply creative individuals who play in a multitude of other groups including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo, united by a shared decade of spry musicality that surges through their bodies, hearts and heads with Trash Kit. Their songs once succinct, patchwork post-punk numbers of an honest diary-like nature now tussle more with long-form songwriting, expeditious polyphony and cascades of sung-spoke vocals.   Trash Kit’s approach to music is one of openness, inclusion and realised potential and ‘Horizon’ is an album with that in dutiful abundance. It’s an album that forever listens for the next moment and will meet you once more at the vanishing point. Brooklyn Vegan have just shared the first sleeping giant of a single and title track to help us announce the album, take a look/listen!

This July also sees us re-issuing 'What's Going On?' by Normil Hawaiians, their exalted masterstroke from 1984, recorded in rural Wales and packed full of experiments in tape collage, long-form song and improvised modes of existence!   Whereas their debut album ‘More Wealth Than Money’ had evolved in the recording studio, its follow up ‘What’s Going On?’ developed as a more pre-meditated yet still spontaneous work. The group already held the seeds of their improv-heavy songs in their pockets and decided to revel in chance and vision more, allowing further layers of exploration to accrete in a vast stitched together tapestry of meaning. Like our other re-earthings of Normil Hawaiians incredible output July’s release will feature copious notes, photos and bonus tracks galore, a limited LP version even includes a hand-numbered poster inspired by proto-anarchist and Paris Commune icon Louise Michel, whose famous speech before her deportation judgement of 1871 is quoted throughout one of the album’s most pivotal tracks. The Quietus premiered ‘Market Place’ from the album this week, let it take you on a journey here.

Trash Kit and Normil Hawaiians’ new albums are both available to pre-order from out webshop now!

Upset The Rhythm & Hygiene presents…   HYGIENE WORMS CHILD’S POSE CHUBBY CHARLES STATIC SHOCK DISCO (from 11pm-1am) Friday 24 May The Stag’s Head, 55 Orsman Rd, London, N1 5RA 8pm | £5 on the door!   HYGIENE released a slew of singles and an LP on various DIY labels in the US and the UK at the turn of the decade, now the London post-punk stalwarts return from hiatus with their sophomore effort, ‘Private Sector’. Where their debut LP ‘Public Sector’ (2011, La Vida Es Un Mus) reflected a nostalgic longing for an unrealised socialist modernist utopia, ‘Private Sector’ finds them confronting the grim realities of the present. Hygiene rail against the neoliberal madness of utility cartels, tax havens and privatised railways, seizing the moment as the current period of interregnum sees the old ideological certainties come into question. Proving nostalgia to be an inescapable trap, the band continue to hearken back to the kind of post-punk that existed before anybody knew to affix the ‘post’ prefix. ‘Private Sector’ (out May 24th through Upset The Rhythm) has the signature Hygiene sound, mixing brooding melodies with a choppy, aggressive approach and a restricted pop sensibility. However, this ever-so-slightly-more mature record finds the band taking advantage of the musicianship of their friends, mixing in the odd viola, glockenspiel, piano and keyboard. Recommended for fans of Real Ale, British Rail Class 55 Deltics, Euston station and Jeremy Corbyn. https://thequietus.com/articles/26313-hygiene-replacement-bus-new-track-album-upset-the-rhythm-listen   London post-punk stalwarts Hygiene return from hiatus for the launch of their sophomore LP 'Private Sector', available 24th May on Upset the Rhythm. With support from DIY post-punkers Worms and Child's Pose. Bands done by 11pm, Static Shock disco until 1am. Special appearance by Oi! poet Chubby Charles. Real Ale and overland rail connections available. https://thewormstheworms.bandcamp.com/releases https://childspose.bandcamp.com/album/two-songs

Upset The Rhythm presents…   ANA DA SILVA & PHEW TARANTULA Monday 27 May St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, King's Cross, NW1 1UL 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS   ANA DA SILVA & PHEW have a new collaborative album entitled Island, full of absorbing textures, tactile beats, and a masterfully dynamic compositional style. Each cavernous track feels like a conversation, and out of the ominous dark comes a generative hope. Ana and Phew contribute pointillist bits of spoken word in each other’s native tongues of Portuguese and Japanese, reflecting on isolation, friendship, and nature. The quotidian is made profound. A gripping mood is set by the shared stoicism and subtle playfulness of these two cult punk icons. Island’s logic is one of wise minimalism. There is a feeling of discovery that will be familiar to Raincoats fans—a sense of poetry and inquisitiveness, of intuition and invention, of new languages taking shape. Ana da Silva is a founding member and songwriter of the pioneering post-punk band The Raincoats. Across four daring full-length records, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it - an act of raw expression, not any one sound. The Raincoats have offered creative and spiritual inspiration for several generations of artists. They set a crucial precedent for feminist work within a DIY punk context, marked all the while by Ana’s poetic lyrical style and innovative noise guitar playing. After The Raincoats’ hiatus in 1984, Ana collaborated with The Go-Betweens, This Heat’s Charles Hayward and choreographer/dancer Gaby Agis. Ana returned to song writing and performing with The Raincoats after Kurt Cobain invited them to tour with Nirvana shortly before his untimely death in 1994, and they released an album ‘Looking in the Shadows’ in 1995 on DGC and Rough Trade. In 2005, Ana released her solo debut, ‘The Lighthouse’ - a self-recorded collection of spare, elegant experiments in electronic indie-pop. Ana’s recent appearances with The Raincoats include a 2016 collaboration with Angel Olsen for Rough Trade’s 40th anniversary, as well as a 2017 presentation at The Kitchen, New York of The Raincoats and Friends, a celebration of Jenn Pelly’s book The Raincoats. http://www.anadasilva.net/ Phew consolidated her binary interests as a vocal performer and analogue electronics improviser with the 2017 release of her album ‘Voice Hardcore’. Indeed, since her 2013 conversion to analogue electronics Phew has continued evolving her live solo project around the world. In 2015 she released her first almost entirely solo-driven album, aptly titled ‘A New World’, on the Japanese label Felicity featuring nine songs backed by herself on electronics and drum machine, with contributions from Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, and synthesizer / electronics player Hiroyuki Nagashima. In 1978 Phew started out as the singer in Aunt Sally, the Osaka punk group who released just one outstanding album on Vanity Records. A year later Phew released her debut solo single, produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 1981 she made her debut solo album ‘Phew’ at legendary producer Conny Plank’s studio near Cologne, accompanied by Plank, and Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. She returned to Conny’s studio to make ‘Our Likeness’ (Mute, 1992) with Jaki Liebezeit, former DAF/Liaisons Dangereuses member Chrislo Haas and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Alexander Hacke. And in 2011, she and Erika Kobayashi formed Project UNDARK to record the texts of ‘Radium Girls’ with music by the late Dieter Moebius, of Cluster. In Japan she has made a series of acclaimed records under her own name and with leading bands such as Novo Tono and her contemporary punk group Most too. https://phewjapan.bandcamp.com/ TARANTULA are a free-form punk racket formed on planet Glasgow 2017; a low brow jazz melting stair tumble, the sound of joy. All associates of the Glasgow DIY ganglands and normative rock bands, Tarantula - influenced only by shreds videos - take all shapes; every moment improvised and transient. Comparisons have been made with Y-pants, the magic band, the Arkestra and Hole. itsticks.github.io/tarantula

Upset The Rhythm presents…   CHRIS COHEN THE JELAS Wednesday 29 May MOTH Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, London, E8 1EL 7.30pm | £9 | TICKETS   CHRIS COHEN’s songs initially sound easy. They’re each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you’ll reach a melancholy core. His previous two albums, 2012’s ‘Overgrown Path’, and 2016’s ‘As If Apart’, were built from lush, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your subconscious, like they’d always been there. ‘Chris Cohen’, his new solo album on Captured Tracks, was written and recorded in his Lincoln Heights studio and at Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the course of the last two years. Cohen would sing melodies into his phone, fleshing them out on piano, then constructing songs around the melodies, and later, adding lyrics and other instrumentation with the help of Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, among others. It is his most straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an unofficial cycle that began with ‘Overgrown Path’. ‘Chris Cohen’ is an album about pain and loss but it’s also about accepting loss. Of the song “Green Eyes,” Cohen says “[It’s about] the men in my family and how they passed their worldview along to each other from great emotional distances. My father and grandfather were full of secrets and longing, which were communicated through everyday actions like driving a car or cooking a meal. We all wanted closeness, but never found it in each other.” This is a statement about a specific song, but it is also a statement about the album as a whole: it’s a beautiful sound, but it’s also unflinching in its depiction of emotional turmoil. https://chriscohen.bandcamp.com/ THE JELAS are smart, complicated and intricate. They are angular and fidgety and their lyrics are poetic and funny and it all fits together perfectly but only just. Listening to their ‘Beetroot Yourself’ record makes you think about complexity in art. Furthermore the lyrics are totally and completely beautiful. They are poetic, filled with imagery and metaphor but Colin and Nat’s delivery is so unaffected they never come across as pretentious, only truthful. https://jelas.bandcamp.com/

Thanks for all your time, enjoy the weekend! Upset The Rhythm

UPSET THE RHYTHM UPCOMING SHOWS

HYGIENE WORMS CHILD’S POSE CHUBBY CHARLES STATIC SHOCK DISCO (from 11pm-1am) Friday 24 May The Stag’s Head, 55 Orsman Rd, London, N1 5RA 8pm | £5 on the door!   ANA DA SILVA & PHEW TARANTULA Monday 27 May St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, King's Cross, London, NW1 1UL 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS   LANKUM BRIGHDE CHAIMBEUL (May 28) ANDY THE DOORBUM (May 29) Tuesday 28 May & Wednesday 29 May In association with Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL 7.30pm | SOLD OUT   CHRIS COHEN THE JELAS Wednesday 29 May MOTH Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, London, E8 1EL 7.30pm | £9 | TICKETS   BILGE PUMP WITCHING WAVES SLAGHEAP Friday 31 May The Islington, 1 Tolpuddle St, Angel, London, N1 0XT 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS   SACRED PAWS COMFORT LEATHER.HEAD  Thursday 13 June Redon, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £8.50 | TICKETS   PATIENCE DESPICABLE ZEE VIENNETTA Tuesday 18 June MOTH Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, London, E8 1EL 7.30pm | £8 | TICKETS   ELF POWER BAMBOO Wednesday 19 June OSLO, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney Central, E8 1LL 7.30pm | £12.50 | TICKETS   CONSTANT MONGREL SLUMB PARTY PETER SIMPSON SNIFFANY & THE NITS Saturday 22 June New River Studios 199 Eade Rd, Harringay Warehouse District, London, N4 1DN 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS   NORMIL HAWAIIANS RATTLE ERASERS Thursday 11 July Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS RAYS (Trouble In Mind) Tuesday 16 July Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London, E8 2EB 7.30pm | £7 | TICKETS DANIEL HIGGS ETERNAL BROADCAST Wednesday 17 July HQI, The Rotunda, Wood Lane, White City Place, London, W12 7TP (3 min walk from White City tube directly north up Wood Lane. Venue is behind the green gates) 7.30pm | £10 | TICKETS   PRISON RELIGION (Halcyon Veil) HYPERSTITION DUO Friday 19 July The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £8.50 | TICKETS   ADVANCE BASE ALICE HUBBLE Monday 22 July Redon, Railway Arches, 289 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 9HA 7.30pm | £12 | TICKETS   TIM PRESLEY’S WHITE FENCE ROBERT SOTELO Wednesday 21 August OSLO, 1a Amhurst Road, Hackney Central, London, E8 1LL 7.30pm | £12.50 | TICKETS   MARY LATTIMORE Thursday 29 August The Courtyard Theatre, 40 Pitfield Street, Shoreditch, N1 6EU 7.30pm | £10 |TICKETS   DEERHOOF DOG CHOCOLATE Monday 2 September EartH, 11-17 Stoke Newington Rd, Dalston, London, N16 8BH 7.30pm | £15 | TICKETS